HELSINKI – Ari Nevalainen showed an encoded piece of plastic to an electronic sensor. In front of his little white car, a gray aluminum door, set into a granite hillside, cracked open and the two halves slid into the rock walls.
Mr. Nevalainen, gaunt and serious, tapped the accelerator and the car rolled forward, taking us [...]

MIAMI – When Hurricane Katrina walloped New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast four years ago, the evacuation got started late and many people decided to ride out the storm. Bad decision.
A lot of people had harrowing experiences. About 1,800 others died, most because of flooding.
Hurricane specialists spend much of their time preaching that early [...]

HELSINKI – Finland is a good place to get a drink of water. But it wasn’t always so.
More than 30 years ago the pulp paper factories here were booming and polluting the rivers and lakes. The drinking water smelled of chlorine and sometimes looked faintly like dirty dish water. The Finns called it “Ugly Water.”
Then came [...]

ORLANDO – Most Americans have never lived through a hurricane. And that’s to the good.
But every year thousands of Americans move into the Hurricane Zone along the southern coasts of the United States. They don’t have hurricane experience. And that is not so good.
Once families and singles and retirees arrive in the Carolinas or Georgia, [...]